what i'm really wondering is how can you trust someone if you don't know if they are serious or not. i guess, that's the root. but i mean, obiously people don't feel things the same way. but is there anything that everyone can agree on as reality? as anything?

it's funny to say things like that.
the only thing i can guarantee is that i can't guarntee anything? but if you make that guarantee than that is obviouslly a flawed statement. because one gurantee is certainly something.

but i just mean, are all of our notions of good and bad completey abstract? is there anything that is unconditioned? instinct?

[quote]Originally posted by krangs_androidbody:
<strong>what i'm really wondering is how can you trust someone if you don't know if they are serious or not. i guess, that's the root. but i mean, obiously people don't feel things the same way. but is there anything that everyone can agree on as reality? as anything?</strong><hr></blockquote>

All facts of reality factor down to assumptions which cannot be proven. That is, with all things real, it boils down to "existence exists." That's self-evident, but unprovable in any logical sense.

However, we have experience, brought to us by sifting sensory data through the belief systems we've developed through a lifetime's previous experience, and which proves out often enough to be reliable. "Sticking my hand in the fire hurts" being an example of such a belief. We add to that what we deduce to be true (thinking about and evaluating those beliefs in the face of new experiences; applying logic to that which is "known") and we have a pretty good set of tools for seeing reality in a human context.

How can we know that those basic assumtions on which our reality relies won't change? Like knowing the sun will come up tomorrow, we can't know for sure, theoretically, but we still seem to be able to treat it as a fact.

I wrote a thread on faith, which discusses the idea that a person must have faith in himself to bridge the gap between the need to take action (to survive, at least) and the human inability to know absolutely all the facts necessary to make a 100% sure decision. Perhaps this is the answer about indisputable truths you seek.

There are none, because we cannot know everything about everything. However, there are 99.99% sure things, and we must bridge the gap of .01% with faith that we will be right.